John Lent reviews my Songs for little sleep, (2012) over at Arc poetry magazine,

John Lent was good enough to review my Songs for little sleep, (2012) over at Arc Poetry Magazine. [see the original review here] Thanks, John!

rob mclennan. Songs for little sleep. Koriyama, Japan: Obvious Epiphanies Press, 2012.
~Reviewed by John Lent

Nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.
–Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, 1977

I have been aware of rob mclennan’s poetry for fifteen years now, and aware, too, of the boisterous, clever and thoughtful presence he brings to discussions of contemporary poetics. Having said that, however, I will discuss only two aspects of mclennan’s poetics as I understand them in this new volume: faith in the banal and playful diction. To me, both aspects represent risk-taking that I admire in contemporary poetry, even though they carry with them the equal risk of initiating the poem’s collapse. In the end, I think mclennan succeeds in both taking these risks and delivering something rather wonderful in Songs for little sleep.

The first risk is mclennan’s faith in the ordinary. It seems silly, sometimes, talking about the material of poetry in this way—but it’s huge. By ‘ordinary’ I mean the quotidian, throw-away objects & situations & images & voices that mill around and populate these poems. mclennan exhibits faith that this material will open up on the wondrous, on a surprise of complexity maybe, on beauty, or whatever else we might want to name it. As Wittgenstein mutters cryptically in Tractatus, “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.” Over and over again in these poems—as their process of creation—mclennan is willing to run the risk of collapsing into the ordinariness he celebrates. As a result, the poems are redeemed by the elusive and resistant and inexplicable and not-to-be-reduced-or-articulated magic that is waiting to ‘show’ itself at the heart of this often-dismissed ‘banal.’ When I was in my thirties, I got a letter from P K Page in which she worried that my poems might suffer from being too “quotidian.” And though I loved P K Page’s wonderful poems (and still do) and seriously sought her approval, something innocent and stubborn in me knew she was wrong about the word. Reading mclennan’s poems carries me back into that moment of struggle with P K Page’s judgment—the wonder of the “quotidian” and the risk of expressing it.

When mclennan refers to the word ‘collaged’ in his end notes, he is referring not only to the first risk mentioned above—allowing the ‘ordinary’ to present itself as a field of juxtapositions, loosely unified—but also to the second risk—allowing ‘play’ in diction and syntax to support other surprises in logic through unexpected association. Again, this is not easy territory; it can readily backfire into a mediocre display of automatic writing (at best) or obscurantism (at worst). But when it works, when it really opens things up—as in Kroetsch, Bowering, bissett, Moure, Cooley, Jake Kennedy, kevin mcpherson eckoff, Natalie Simpson—it can create a true ‘rush’ of making and re-making for the reader. It can be breathtaking. In the context of this risk, mclennan is relaxed and confident and the poems are fascinating and exciting.

If I had been editing this book, I might have advised mclennan to subdue the communal bounce of the self-referential by removing the double-whammy of beginning each poem with a reference to another text (usually written by a friend), then compounding the situation with a dedication to another friend (another writer). In a sequence that is already so committed to the autobiographical, this effect can be a bit cloying. These poems do not need that busy-ness. They stand by themselves just fine.

BOOK LAUNCH: rob mclennan + Beatriz Hausner at A B Series, January 31, 2013

ROB MCLENNAN & BEATRIZ HAUSNER

8:00pm
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Ottawa Art Gallery, Firestone Gallery
2 Daly Ave, Ottawa
Free / a hat will be passed

A B Series gratefully acknowledges the support of the City of Ottawa, Ontario Arts Council, and, through the League of Canadian Poets, the Canada Council for the Arts.

Info at the A B Series website here, including author bios.

rob mclennan will be launching Songs for little sleep, (Obvious epiphanies press, 2012).

Daily offerings: a note on “Songs for little sleep,”

Lyn Hejinian described to me her work in progress, The Border Comedy, as being instigated by the notion of a collaboration in which one sends one line to someone else and the other person adds to it; yet in The Border Comedy she writes one line, then allows time to pass and comes back to it. She couldn't get a line sufficiently unfamiliar, so began to work on all fifteen books of The Border Comedy (it is intended to be modeled on the fifteen books of Ovid’s Metamorphosis) at the same time, perhaps only returning to one spot in the work a couple of weeks after it was written and only looking at a few lines on the computer at once (in order not to ‘remember’ the background). “In order to keep writing fresh the memory of it has to fade. Unfamiliar, it is ‘of the moment.’”

            In language horizontal and vertical time can occur at the same moment. Hejinian says that the unfamiliarity of the writing is a prompt; it prompts the future.

Leslie Scalapino, “The Radical Nature of Experience [on Philip Whalen, Lyn Heijinian, Susan Howe, and Leslie Scalapino],” How Phenomena Appear to Unfold

The sequence of poems that make up “Songs for little sleep,” feel different in tone from much of what I’d written previously. Different, but part of a logical progression of poetry manuscripts over the previous eighteen months, from “Miss Canada” (closing out the “wild horses” quintet) to “If suppose this is a fragment” and “The underside of the line,” the last pieces of which were completed just before the beginning of this new work. Composed between July 5^th and September 1^st, 2011, “Songs for little sleep,” is a series of quick texts composed in moments once taken up by certain other activities, and coincides entirely with the weeks I shared Christine McNair’s tiny apartment in Old Ottawa East before we finally moved into a shared space more appropriate to our newly-combined requirements. During this period, house-sitting replaced television and travel replaced house-sits. What would I do without my nocturnal hours of television? There was the way her apartment was so different than mine, and other (positive) disruptions, shifting a daily routine: the displacements of co-habitation that writing occupied. For this particular manuscript, I attempted to directly utilize and engage the distractions; poems were composed quickly, one per sitting, using collaged words or phrases skimmed, misread, lifted, carved, twisted and/or mashed-up with other fragments, and inserted into the fray. The musical cadence of the line continues but more a sweep, a wave or even flood. Many of the triggers for particular poems come from a longer work, from which a quoted fragment appears at the beginning of each piece, often with additional fragments from (where applicable) the dedicated, slipping quick on lines broken, shattered, and re-formed into new shapes, as twisted as possible. In various pieces, tenses and genders deliberately don’t meet up, and meanings alter. Skimmed and mis-readings were essential. Accidents and mis-communications were encouraged, if not downright celebrated.

Our dear friend, the late Robert Kroetsch once asked, How do you make love in a new country?

In the mid-1980s, Vancouver writer George Bowering crafted a collection of what he subtitled “late night poems,” his Delayed Mercy & other poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986). Supposedly composed in his home office, at the end of his long day of teaching, the poems in his collection were composed from his Kerrisdale point-on-a-grid. I don’t mean to suggest that “Songs for little sleep,” is exclusively a “late night poems,” but one created out of stolen moments – early morning and later night – that circle other projects in an environment slightly foreign to my writing day: various reviews, essays, a creative non-fiction manuscript and one or more fictions. These poems were composed directly on the laptop, as opposed to sketched out longhand, as so much of my writing has always been. Notebooks fill my study, two-and-a-half decades worth. Unlike so much that came before, these poems were quickly formed during periods once caught up with summer repeats, instead television-less in a small apartment in Ottawa’s Old Ottawa East, a visit to Toronto’s Old Mill, a housesit in Ottawa’s Lindenlea, and her mother’s cabin in the Laurentian Hills. Shattered routine began to reform, congeal into other shapes. My days and shifted nights. Books were pulled near-random from foreign bookshelves for the sake of the unfamiliar, as Scalapino writes of Heijinian. I rejoiced in the differences. What occurs when the familiar and the unfamiliar continually meet?

rob mclennan

Ottawa ON
October 2012

[photo credit: Lary Bremner]

Gerry Gilbert, COUNTERFEIT PENNIES

There most likely aren’t too many titles by the late Vancouver poet and publisher Gerry Gilbert (April 7, 1936 – June 19, 2009) in print anymore, with the exception possibly of the chapbook PERHAPS (Toronto ON: BookThug, 1999) and the reissued Moby Jane (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004), but the enthusiasm for his work appears to have steadily increased over the past few years. Since Gilbert died, a tribute blog appeared, with regular updates, and there are more references to him online that one might think, for an author who barely published through trade form over his last two decades. Now, thanks to Vancouver poets Lary Bremner (publisher of Obvious Epiphanies Press), Carol and Jamie Reid, who went through Gilbert’s archive, we now have access to his COUNTERFEIT PENNIES (North Vancouver BC: obvious epiphanies press, 2012) as a free pdf download.

During the early 60’s in Vancouver, Gerry Gilbert was part of an informal grouping of “downtown Vancouver poets” with John Newlove, Judith Copithorne, Maxine Gadd and Roy Kiyooka, less a group than a ying to the yang of TISH. With a healthy distrust of editors and (seemingly) publisher, Gilbert’s expansive ouvre appeared in trade form with great effort, as he infamously refused to have his work edited. He even turned down the opportunity to be in a series of selected poems that Talonbooks produced around 1980 (others in the series included bpNichol, Daphne Marlatt and Fred Wah). As Frank Davey wrote about Gilbert in From There to Here (Erin ON: Press Porcepic, 1974):

Gilbert’s experimental world is that of most men alive in these decades, mundane, trivial, thoroughly non-spectacular – enriched only by the easily missed miracles of animals, plants, the weather, or intimate human gesture. He presents this world in the way in which it impinges on him: a puzzingly discontinuous flow of broken images. “AND”, the title of one of his books, is the usual Gilbert conjunction, since it implies no logical structure or relationship. To Gilbert, experience is endless non sequitur.

As Davey suggests, Gilbert’s writing was an endless, singular line of ephemera, miracles and “intimate human gesture,” documenting the entirety of what he saw, felt and did, taking the Frank O’Hara “I did this, I did that” poem to its extreme. Dated 1996 to 1997, Gilbert’s COUNTERFEIT PENNIES is wonderfully reproduced exactly the way the author intended, scanning directly from the mass of binders that filled his small apartment. There is the strangest kind of detail in Gilbert’s work, knowing that his work was composed of a single, straight, life-long line, one that readers only saw in the comparatively briefest parcels.

            The way he said it to me, that I didn’t remember but we’d met years ago, put me on the defensive right away, smelling trouble. He got my number alright. I’m so beat I can barely play along enough to read the paper; or want what I really want; or really want what I want. As my voice gets fainter, I pile on the wisdom; bore ; ing. If you know what this means, you must have read it already.

There aren’t many copies of Gerry Gilbert works available out in the world anymore, but I’m sure if you want to read further of his works, I’d recommend jwcurry’s Room 302 Books in Ottawa as the best place to begin.

The Capilano Review 3.16: ecologies

In my opening pages, the identity

of the characters is contested as

a forgery of imagery bound up

with the claims and dispositions

of country. It seems in order

to sustain power in all this,

the city upholds an illusion of

authority over the north, so that

the influential with the most is

a problem to which I return.

But cultures are cumbersome,

each with acquired tastes, and

what is this blur about belonging?

By the time I came along in the

literature, the land was exhausted

and the local I knew was fading. (Ken Belford, “Potential”)

I’m intrigued by the length and the breadth of the definition this new issue of The Capilano Review brings to the theme of “ecologies,” running the stretch of what might be called “eco-poetry” and “pastoral” and further, into less-described territories. This new issue features new writing by Liz Howard, Eleni Sikelianos, Christian Bök, Ken Belford, Jacqueline Turner, Larissa Lai, A. Rawlings, Lary Timewell, Adam Dickinson and plenty of others. What might fall under the umbrella of “ecologies”? 

As a whole cloth, this is a spectacular issue that tackles a wide array of political, social, physical, poetic, social and economic ethos and effects of a variety of ecologies, including globalization, the effects of natural disaster and climate change. By itself, the sequence by Calgary poet Christian Bök, for example, is absolutely breathtaking. 

One of the anchors to the issue as a whole is the piece “’Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’: On Poetry and the Environmental Crisis,” featuring Joanne Arnott, Michael Blackstock, Peter Culley, Roger Farr, Christine Leclerc and Rita Wong. As Farr writes, “This discussion took place on September 18, 2011, on a private “Ecologies” blog set up for the occasion.”

RF: I’m curious about how poetics informs the activist work some of you are doing: Christine’s work against the Enbridge project, for example. Do people active as poets bring anything unique to the movement for environmental protection and defense?

CL: I like the way the question is framed, as I usually think about my activist work informing my poetics. Actually, I participated in poetic community before activism. But obviously, the crews aren’t mutually exclusive, and in a way, the more involved I became in activist work, the more I got to know poets involved in serving their non-poetic communities, and who are engaged in struggles for justice. That said, poetics does inform the activism that surrounds The Enpipe Line poetry project, as The Enpipe Line is fairly non-hierarchical. The contributions that make up the long line of this poem are selected by the poets who come forward with work and resistance to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipelines, and not a panel of editors. And the poem’s editors work on a volunteer basis. It may seem strange to describe the power focus on it because I think it is an essential feature of the work and an important part of what the poem ultimately has to convey.

[…]

Can poets intervene in the corporate and political manoeuvring that allows unwanted projects to move forward? I’m very curious about this question, but don’t yet have a clear answer.

Vancouver poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s “DECOMP: Selected Readings from the Bunchgrass Zone,” for example, worked a collaborative project of photographs and text on the subject of decay that I would very much like to see more of, writing:

In the summer of 2009 we traveled to five distinct BC ecosystems and communities: the coastal rainforest (on Vancouver Island’s west coast), the Gulf Islands (in the rain shadow of Vancouver Island), the Nicola Valley desert, the Columbia Mountains, and the sub-boreal North. In each ecosystem an identical copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was placed in a remote outdoor location, and left there for one year. A GPS reading was taken. In the summer of 2010 we returned to each site and located the specimens. As we hoped, each ecosystem had something different to say about Darwin’s text.

Toronto writer Liz Howard has two poems from her work-in-progress “OF HEREAFTER SONG,” with a note that reads:

Longfellow’s epic poem, “The Song of Hiawatha,” was an attempt to assimilate indigenous, specifically Ojibway, oral tradition into Western textual, metric verse. My own government-imposed identity as a non-status aboriginal person and the trauma and silence surrounding this identity (as in the internment of my great-grandfather in a residential school and estrangement from my native family members) became an emergent theme in my writing. As a mixed-race person, not even quite a “half-breed;” as a subject under a continual process of erasure; as the ideal end-product of assimilative programs such as the residential school system; and as a scientist, employing empiricism as the so-called paramount of Western inquiry into the natural or into how we come to utilitarian truth—how could I even write about this? There was something similar, suspicious, neighbourly between Longfellow’s situation and my own. He was a white settler trying to filter indigenous narrative through the framework of the Western epic and I was trying to reconcile a being at odds with itself. I began to read and un-write his work. The result is a long or sequential work in which I intervene upon the text using several procedures—an overarching process of random sampling (which is the norm in scientific research), as well as homolinguistic translation, intertextual recombination, misappropriation, and cyborgian disruption.

A particular highlight has to be new work by Lary Timewell (also known as Lary Bremner, inventor of Tsunami Editions and more recent obvious epiphanies), who, but a few short weeks ago, returned to Vancouver after a hiatus of some twenty-plus years. As his bio writes, “He spent roughly the past 20 years in Fukushima-ken, Japan, where he survived the physical but not economic fallout of the March 11^th Higashi Nihon Daishinsai; he currently lives in North Vancouver.” Given his experiences with the tsunami hitting his home city in Japan (the city with the disaster-affected nuclear reactors), it allows him a unique and terrifying perspective on the subject of “ecologies.” Here is a fragment of his poem “escape,” from a suite titled “offshore”:

At Yahiko Shrine the raindrops are opaque, an invisible display. No one is so anthropomorphic as to think Nature is apologizing for the moment past. That is to say, any one of us born. There is this world & there is the cessation of suffering, even under shifting fault-line that obliterates time. A veil of birds passing is once again an abstraction forming on the forehead.

The ghosts were torn from the buildings; the apparatus of moonlight unlocked. There are no words for counting the days. Behind door #3, the hell-wraith of mental & material streams, but here in Niigata my nearest neighbor is the weather. The mountain appears as a particle deluge, the rain constructed amorously of retinal seraphs.

My wife & son are safe in Tokyo. CNN is on anabolic steroids; the static the frayed experience raise cilia-hairs on the forearms of hope. Habitué flock to convenience stores reciting nuclear eclogues formed in the precise matrices of chrysanthemums painted on the side of a wall.

Language tastes better with the tang of wasabi, the cool of daikon. That kid with a diamond-encrusted tricycle is sunlight itself. The ululating somnambulistic of media dissipates like an involuntary communion along the auditory canal. Wooly moon through fog forms fissures on sheets, on ceiling.

Call and response: a note on Phil Hall, and 52 flowers (or, a perth edge)

a piece I wrote on the poetry collection I wrote on/around poet/editor Phil Hall, 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) -- an essay on Phil Hall -- (Obvious Epiphanies Press, 2010), now up at The Maple Tree Literary Supplement;

Ongoing notes: early May, 2011;

Do you remember when I used to post these things regularly? I'm trying to get back into such, despite all these distractions happening, currently in the mist of a house-sit in Old Ottawa South [alongside pirate dinosaurs, pictured]. Patrick Carroll recently posted an article online from my recent Pivot Reading in Toronto; in case you weren't able to make it, apparently I'm reading in Toronto again on May 17 as part of the Avant-Garden series (with the following night featuring as part of Margaret Christakos' Influency Workshops). With the first reading focusing predominantly on the new poetry collection, Glengarry (Talon), I'm thinking this next should focus more on recent/unpublished works. Make sense? Later on, in Niagara Falls the first weekend in June reading alongside Monty Reid, as well as participating in a book fair; the following weekend, reading alongside Jon Paul Fiorentino at WESTFEST.

And don't forget The Factory Reading Series on May 20^th, featuring readings and new publications by Stan Rogal (Insomniac Press), Bruce Taylor (Cormorant Books) and Ben Ladouceur (above/ground press). With a month later, the ottawa small press book fair!

Oh Mother's Day. The first one post-mother sucks. I sent my sister a card.

Ottawa ON: Ottawa poet Cameron Anstee, known for thoughtfully-produced limited edition chapbooks is also known for thoughtfully-produced poems, including a chapbook produced by above/ground press, Frank St. (2010). For the sake of a recent reading he gave at the blUe mOndays Reading Series on April 18, 2011, at the University of Ottawa's Cafe Nostalgica, he distributed a small self-published work in an edition of thirty copies, She May Be Weary (St. Andrew Books, 2011). The nine page/nine part exists in the shade of Monty Reid's meditative lines, and the ghazals of John Thompson, writing:

is it appropriate to speak of invention?

is it adequate to speak of source?

Beginning with a quote/poem by Richard Brautigan (“At last our bodies collide. / I bet you thought this / would never happen. [...]”), I'm intrigued by the referencing here, from Thompson to Brautigan to Artie Gold, poets you wouldn't expect to be in too many repertoires, let alone all three at once (impressive, I say), but sometimes I wonder if the references distract; or perhaps this is the entire point? The worthy moments that exist here are many, between the slats of the poem, between the lines of further lines; a poem for his partner willed with all the heart and consideration one might expect in such a poem. There are some very worthy moments inside this piece, and the poem as a whole holds together but barely; still, this is very much a poet worth watching over the next couple of years. He will possibly end up doing some things that might just surprise us all.

there is work to be done. the head aches

close the lights, close the sound, hold the cat

I fear John Thompson ruined it

for the rest of us

rather

the few of us

I spread out glasses, water, vinegar

sugar, dish soap; kill fruit flies

I believed one thing once,

and still, and another yet

the attentions of the poem are divided

the dock always feels as though it looks north

Fukushima, Japan: I find it pretty entertaining that, after years of being out of publishing, Canadian expat Lary Bremner, formerly of Vancouver's Tsunami Editions, has started Obvious Epiphanies Press by publishing, apart from himself, poets living in Ottawa, Canada's glorious capital. So far, he's produced two chapbooks of his own, a book by myself, and chapbooks by Monty Reid (part of his ongoing “Garden” series) and Pearl Pirie, publishing her Between Stations (2011). What Ottawa poets might he publish next?

After years of small chapbooks, Pirie is the author of the trade collection been shed bore (Chaudiere Books, 2010), and recently won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing for her manuscript “Thirsts,” which will appear this fall with Montreal's Snare Books as part of the prize. Pirie's Between Stations exists as a series of train poems, travel poems, floating through the Windsor-Quebec corridor, exploring visual poems, short lyrics, and language poems almost as documentary, with slicing commentary and observation along the way. I wonder, too, were any of these composed around or after her Ottawa-Toronto round-trip hopping freight with jwcurry? Pirie is best when she lets the flow of the language propel her, when she lets herself go, floating down that river, not entirely sure where she might end up.

across railway bridges, Quebec I'm

zooming your x-ings, wigwags

valleys under tongues

silver rails' quick prayers, our needs mild

landscapes karabinered

joined: invisible hovels, gentrified families

emptied dioramas

churches behind alleys

When she launched this collection recently at the ottawa international writers festival, one of the highlights of her reading was the poem “once we arrive we can find something tangible,” beginning with a quote by Cornelius Van Horne, General Manager of the CPR, 1885: “If we cannot export the scenery, we shall have to import the tourists!” The repetition and twists of some of her lines nearly echoing the repetitive clack-clack of the train down the tracks, through a mode of travel originally used as luxury, decades of working-class, and now, nearly existing as luxury again.

have you been peddled a piece of this

yet? the dull camouflage polished off

the common mollusks, a cartooned loon

painted on mother of pearl?

tourists are rhetorical. time is place.

Bremner's Obvious Epiphanies Press (Japan) now has a website;

Lary Bremner's Obvious Epiphanies Press, based in Japan, now has a website, here, with titles by Pearl Pirie, myself + Bremner, with even more forthcoming. Also, see his 12 or 20 questions on the press here.

12 or 20 (small press) questions: Lary Bremner (Timewell) on Obvious Epiphanies Press

A former member of Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing, Lary Bremner was an early editor of the late 1980s and early 90s Tsunami Editions, and now lives in Japan. He has published a number of titles under the name Lary Timewell, including two new chapbooks from Obvious Epiphanies.

1 – When did Obvious Epiphanies first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

Just started some months ago. I was making a handmade book for photographer friend Lorraine Gilbert & remembered how much I liked the process. Around the same time, I discovered that American poets Norma Cole, Ted Greenwald, and others were using online services to publish chapbooks. I got the bug again.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

Peter Culley, Gerald Creede, & Arni Runar Haraldsson & I met in the 80's to talk about writing. We never talked about writing, but Tsunami Editons, Vancouver, got started.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

To represent those who, for whatever reason, aren't in 'big' publishing.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

Publishing Canadians & Americans, but doing it from Japan?

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?

Online, the web, online publishing, e-books, pdfs, blogs.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

I trust the writer to know what s/he wants, means, intends. I get more hands-on with design.

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

Lulu.com advertises. rob mclennan promotes. Printed on demand.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

O Solo mio, my own worst enemy.

9 – How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

Reminds me I should get back to it.

10 – How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

Question irrelevant; aversions personal. Me, I'd much rather have someone else publish my work, but in the internet age it really does not actually matter.

11 – How do you see obvious epiphanies evolving?

Primarily, as an outlet for young &/or unpublished poets. Then I'd like to create a parallel press, as wide as possible, graphic books, novels, kids books, Japanese books, photography books.

12 – What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?

Just started. Proud to have overcome the software.

13 – Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

Our old Tsunamis. The Tuumba series.

14 – How does Obvious Epiphanies work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Obvious Epiphanies in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

Question too grand for me, but the poetry community is international, in any case. The web certainly is.

15 – Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

Readings are the best way to create a local community. I live in Japan... come over & read your book at the local issakaya.

16 – How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

100 per cent.

17 – Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

For the moment I will seek out certain writers on my inclination & the advice of friends, but anticipate taking submissions in 2011.

18 – Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

rob mclennan's 52 flowers (or, a perth ledge) & two small chapbooks of my own, because that's the entire output so far!

12 or 20 (small press) questions;